A federal judge in Los Angeles has tossed Ford Motor Co.'s renewed racketeering suit accusing several California lemon-law lawyers of running an elaborate overbilling scheme, and has barred the automaker from filing yet another amended complaint. The ruling is the latest chapter in a multiyear legal fight between the Dearborn automaker and a group of Southern California plaintiff firms, and Ford says it plans to appeal.
U.S. District Judge Michelle Williams Court dismissed Ford's latest complaint, concluding that the lawyers' fee petitions were protected by the First Amendment petitioning doctrine and could not form the basis for a RICO claim, according to Reuters. The suit is filed as Ford Motor Company v. Mikhov et al., No. 2:25-cv-04550-MWC-PVC, in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, per Justia.
What Ford alleged
In a complaint filed in May 2025, Ford accused the Knight Law Group and allied firms of running a centralized "fee motion department" that manufactured fraudulent time entries and siphoned more than $100 million in unearned fees, citing entries that claimed multiple 24-hour days and an alleged 57.5-hour workday, as set out in the company’s court filing. The complaint lays out examples and alleges the firms spread inflated fee petitions across thousands of matters to conceal the conduct, according to ALM.
How the judge applied immunity
Judge Michelle Williams Court said the Noerr-Pennington doctrine, which protects petitioning activity in the courts, bars RICO and related claims that are premised on litigation conduct unless the narrow "sham litigation" exception applies. She relied on that line of reasoning to dismiss the suit. The court's opinion explains that because Ford's theory depended on the content of fee petitions and not an independent criminal act, the complaint failed as a matter of law, as detailed in the ALM order.
Defendants push back
The lawyers named in the suit have denied any fraud and argued that Ford's claims are an attempt to chill consumer-protection litigation. Neal Katyal, counsel for Knight Law, said the firm would not be deterred and called the suit a pressure tactic, a reaction reported in contemporaneous coverage of the earlier dismissal. TheStreet summarized those responses and related filings.
What's next
Ford said it will appeal the ruling, according to Reuters, and the company has told investigators it cooperated with federal inquiries into fee petitions. Legal observers note that the dispute exposes a tension between fee-shifting under California's Song-Beverly law and First Amendment petitioning protections, a dynamic explored in coverage by Bloomberg Law.
The dismissal preserves a legal shield for plaintiffs' counsel who win fee awards under Song-Beverly while leaving open questions about systemic oversight of billing practices. Ford's appeal will test whether an appellate court sees a path around petitioning immunity. Both the filings and the judge's orders make clear the fight is now as much about the limits of litigation-based liability as it is about specific time entries, and that dispute is likely headed for higher courts; see the ALM opinion for more detail.
